In the 15 months since Donald Trump shut him out of a White House job, Michael Cohen, the president’s personal lawyer, has made a show of publicly dining with a vocal Trump critic, the billionaire Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban.

After lunch at Freds restaurant in New York in April 2017, a gossip item appeared in the New York Post. When they had breakfast at the Time Warner Center in November, paparazzi “somehow” showed up, Mr. Cuban said. “I think he does it to piss off Trump when Trump is ignoring him.”